18 August 2006

I am fighting a fight of no consequence.
No sense; no barracks or dagger-tipped fence; no construct erected
with trembling sinews and thighs, clenched tense: the marrow of human
effort.

In the pregnant open space reserved (before)
for shifting, groaning pilings;
for proud walls, cracked, stained, thin walls slumping humpbacked [who
would call these anything but;
flawed] walls;
for flawed walls washed translucent, buoyed tall by the tired hands of
men who curl weary bodies down to sleep under worn pillows of hope;
for sighing edifices erected by hands and suspended by love and prayer
and hope; for hands from which coarse brown fingers unfold with
seeping tears
skin too thin to hold the blood falling gold on the damp packed earth.
In the pregnant open space worked by man, by his days and weeks and months,
beside the mottled slopes of blackened earth carved out, cried out;
beneath splintered sooted skies:

It is here,
It is in this space,

that protruding stone, translucent, cold as ice
flails, wheezing, upward
out of barren furrows beaten black with blood
that ran from living hands
to seep,
heavy
and
deep,